Now and at the time, the book with which Héctor Abad Faciolince learned again to write

Minutes before receiving us for this interview, Antioquia novelist Héctor Abad Faciolince received the photographs of the printed specimens of Now and in the hour, His most recent book published by Alfaguara. There, in his study, next to a table full of books – among them one of Victoria Amelina and several by Mario Vargas Llosa– Abad attended the first interview about the story of his journey to the Ukrainian war Frontin which he was about to lose his life during an attack by the Russian forces to the city of Kramorsk.

Abad Faciolince confesses that the writing of the book was a permanent uphill. And it is not for less: the experiences of the war of those days have the strength to sow in the mind of anyone that existential discomfort that psychiatrists call post -traumatic stress. At times, the story of Now and in the hour reveals a mind that copes the ghosts of their own and others’ dead, those who perished for the power of a very russian 600 kilograms of explosive and precision of watchmaker. Of those things – and of others, as will be seen right here – Abad Faciolince spoke with the Colombian.

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“There is a Conrad phrase that I read recently, after finishing this book, which caught my attention because somehow I wanted to do in this book. The phrase is more or less Equal.

I became obsessed with my dad and my mom’s deaths. My dad was killed at 65 and I almost kill me almost at that age. In both cases we struggled for fair causes, but my dad was a true activist, while I was an observer. And in the case of this woman (take a copy of Looking at Women, Looking at Warof Victoria Amelina), naturally I was very impressed that she had the same age of my daughter and that we had been at the same table, that there would have been as a delende of death, a Russian roulette of death with five bullets and that we would have somehow changed posts and in a position the pointed dice fell. “

“I had a feeling before the trip, and perhaps it was the one that led me to do it. The feeling was that I was dying slowly because I have been losing my senses. I lost my sense of taste, smell, I am getting more blind and more deaf.

So yes, behind this book there is an obsession with death, for which it is arriving with old age and with the loss of the senses. All this, somehow, pursues me from the previous book, which has to do with a priest who dies and with an open heart operation where I felt they had killed me.

That is why it seems pertinent that your first question is about death, because it is so. In the restaurant where we were during the attack there were 14 -year -old twins who ate pizza with dad. They died and dad was alive. All these things caused me a mental seizure. I wrote this book in a very difficult mental state. ”

“Everything was very difficult. It was as if I had forgotten to write. For a lot, when I reread what I wrote, I told me: ‘But, did I write this? How could I write such a poorly written paragraph?’ As I am an expert in forgetting, and I wanted to forget those things, I felt the obligation to tell them. But I did not want to tell them twenty years later, as I did with the story of The forgetfulness we will be. I didn’t want to take so long because at that time I will die and because I didn’t want to have that story hammering, even in the background.

But telling it was very hard. Not knowing how to tell it, I did it in two ways. I wrote a novel and this chronicle. I passed them to my editors from Colombia and Spain. Finally, the chronicle survived, which has elements of the essay. ”

“First, this was not such an intense duel. Second, in the years before writing Forgotten I was not thinking about those facts all the time. At that time I thought about educating my children happily, with happiness. I have the conviction that if one does not educate it with the illusion that life is a beraquera, so it is a lie, it becomes much more difficult to live. Then, I educated my children with the history of the grandfather killed in the back. That was not central.

In this book things are different because she (she points out Victoria Amelina) was not my sister neither my relative nor my daughter. She is a woman who met four days, the last four days of her life, which is no small thing. When I met Victoria’s dad, I said: ‘I wasn’t friends with her daughter, but I was with her in her last four days.’

I must also say that the fact that she and my daughter had the same age was something that united me with victory. So yes, I wrote as in an attempt to understand it. Somewhere in the book I say that she dictated parts to me. I don’t believe in those things, but it was as if his ghost was there and I felt it. I also found a phrase from her, which I put in the part of the book epigraphs (refers to the two prayers of the novel A home for Domwho say: ‘Stories should be saved anyway, jump from an almost dead body to another living body. It is his last chance ‘) ”.

“The war is a black hole that swallows lives and lives and lives and lives. More than one million soldiers have already fallen from side and side and many civilians from Ukraine. Then the Gaza War arrived, so that of Ukraine began to lose importance because Netanyahu’s massacres were such dimensions that the others seemed little. In fact, the fiction part of my book I also felt very guilty of taking care of a single war.

War is a machine, it is a death butcher shop. Before Trump’s arrival, there was a minimum agreement in the West that the aggressors were the Russians, which is not the same to invade a country than to be invaded. Then, Trump says the same thing that Tsar Putin says, that the fault is from Zelenski. We live in a desperate and desperate moment for that distant people. In the book I say that I am not an expert, but that I did study a lot about Ukraine. These people are massacrating wild. ”

“Yes, that was the initial contact. When they propose to translate the book to the Ukrainian I have been questions about that country: what language do they speak in Ukraine, how are physically? When one studies these things and tries to understand them, he realizes that their history is very complex and painful. Ukraine is a country that has been invaded by the east, by the west, by the north and by the south, everywhere.

“Ah, this is one of my idols. I did not know that I was born in the current Ukraine. He always spoke of Galitzia.

Precisely, in Chile I found a book from him in which he tells his last trip through Galitzia. He arrives in Lemberg, who is a luopolis, which is Lviv, the city in which Victoria was born. Joseph Conrad was also born in a city of what is now Ukraine. ”

“I include several words that people told me when I returned from that trip. Here in Antioquia the expressions are used ‘I did not touch you’ or ‘That was not the day of yours. Some soul that took care of me.

Also in guilt. The fault of oneself to expose itself to such a danger.

I also included in the book a Roth quote that says that whoever voluntarily exposes a danger commits a sin. ”

“That is very hard. It is hard for a colleague to like Laura Restrepo has said in an interview that the Ukraine Water Movement is a criminal movement. There are still people from the last century who have not realized that Putin has nothing to do with the left, which is a dictator of the extreme right. In fact, those who support it are of extreme right. I think of viktor orbán orbán. Nature of Daniel Ortega and Nicolás Maduro.

Do not take sides in certain wars is to be next to the murderers. Not condemning Hamas’s massacre is being with the murderers how not to condemn Netanyahu’s revenge is being with the murderers. I try not to be anywhere. I condemn Putin flatly. ”